Among flat-panel display devices, thin film transistor liquid crystal display (TFT-LCD), by virtue of its features such as small size, low power consumption, relatively low manufacturing-cost and no radiation, etc., have occupied a dominant position in the current flat panel display market.
A main structure of a TFT-LCD typically comprises: an array substrate and a color-filter substrate, which are cell-assembled and secured together by sealant. In manufacturing processes of a TFT-LCD, sealant needs to be cured, and a sealant-curing process mainly comprises two steps. Firstly, sealant is precured through UV (Ultra-Violet Ray) radiation; then, sealant is thermal-cured by heating. During sealant-precuring, in order to avoid the impact of UV on an effective viewing area of a liquid crystal panel and resulting in a defect in the product, usually, a mask plate (UV photomask plate) for shielding during sealant-curing is required to cover the effective viewing area of a liquid crystal panel.
A UV photomask plate is usually formed through a patterning process. A conventional manufacturing method mainly comprises steps as follows: a light-shielding metal thin-film layer is deposited on a glass substrate; a positive photoresist material layer is coated on the substrate; with a dedicated mask, the substrate is subjected to exposure and development; the substrate is subjected to etching to remove the corresponding light-shielding metal thin film in a sealant region of the liquid crystal panel; the remaining positive photoresist material layer is removed.
A drawback of the conventional technology lies in that, it requires to separately prepare the mask plate used in the UV-photomask plate manufacturing process, which makes the manufacturing costs of the UV photomask plate high and is unbeneficial to resource-saving.